Oil has empowered capitalism, and some of the world’s most exploitative regimes. Move away from it and we can solve some of the key issues we face
Irealise this is a serious breach of etiquette. But could we perhaps abandon good manners and contextualise Donald Trump’s attack on Iran? The intense western interest in the Middle East and west and central Asia, sustained for more than a century, and the endless attempts by foreign governments to shape and control these regions, are not random political tics. They are somewhat connected to certain fuel sources situated beneath the ground.
Trump’s war aims are typically incoherent: apparently incomprehensible even to himself. But Iran would not be treated as an “enemy of the west” were it not for what happened in 1953, when Winston Churchill’s government persuaded the CIA to launch a coup against the popular democratic government of Mohammad Mossadegh. The UK did so because Mossadegh sought to nationalise the Anglo-Iranian Oil Company: to stop a foreign power from stealing the nation’s wealth. The US, with UK support, tried twice to overthrow him, and succeeded on the second attempt, with the help of some opportunistic ayatollahs. It reinstated the shah, Mohammad Reza Pahlavi. In 1954, the Anglo-Iranian Oil Company became British Petroleum, later BP.
Fury about the 1953 coup, combined with ever-more vicious repression under the shah’s dictatorship, triggered the revolution of 1979, which was captured by the ayatollahs, with horrible consequences for many Iranians. They would not be running the country were it not for our governments’ violent crushing of democracy for the sake of oil.
Take a step back from this history, and you see something else that should be obvious. The conflation of capitalism with “free markets” is one of the most successful lies in human history. The historical and ongoing plunder of resources; the police, armies and death squads deployed against those who resist; the shifting of profits from less powerful nations to the major powers; the intimidation of labour; the conning of consumers; the extraction of rent; the dumping of costs on the living planet: all this is the opposite of “free”. It’s highly coercive and extremely expensive.
Much of the time there’s little sign of a market, either. Land, commodities and labour are, in many cases, simply stolen. Public resources, whether oil reserves, forests, water systems or railways are given (or sold at a fraction of their value) to private monopolists. The rich are bailed out by the state when they run into trouble, while the poor must sink or swim. “Free market capitalism” is a contradiction in terms….
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2026/mar/19/iran-greed-oil-capitalism-regimes
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